


desiderata

by magdalen



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst, Coming of Age, Gen, Horror, M/M, Riddle at Hogwarts Era, Slow Burn, War with Grindelwald, Wool's Orphanage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-23
Packaged: 2018-12-13 14:14:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11761635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magdalen/pseuds/magdalen
Summary: Tom Riddle tears through empires, breaking bone and blood into ashfall between fingers. Harry looks at him and sees a boy whose heart hangs heavy from a maelstrom of malcontent.Time drifts and dimensions shift, but their story remains the same.(after all, prophecies exist for a reason)





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> *UPDATE (28/2) Changed the title name*
> 
> a/n
> 
> There is a joy in examining the monstrous. 
> 
> China Mieville's thesis on creatures, birthed from divine portent (literally translated as _monstrum_ in Latin), explains the fascination of "homo sapiens [being the] bringer-forth of monsters as reason’s dream. They are not pathologies but symptoms, diagnoses, glories, games, and terrors." 
> 
> — but I am rambling. The tale of Tom Riddle being retold on AO3 is a popular one. I have nothing against redemption (fine, cathartic) arcs, however there is something remarkably jarring in seeing writers cast away (and thus devaluing _!_ ) Riddle’s monstrosity by making him human. 
> 
> Ok. So yes, I have a lot of feelings about monster boys and prophesied heroes with a savior complex and I just ?? want to write a fic where they struggle: because sometimes the beast eats you, because sometimes you want to gently reach over and kiss the monster. 
> 
> \+ fic title derived from “Goblin Market”, a proper skinshiver poem by Christina Rossetti

__

## prologue

__

##  __

_“nothing vast enters the lives of mortals without ruin"  
— _ from _Antigonick_ by Sophokles, trans. Anne Carson

 

* * *

  

 _Blood_. Tom snarls in a corner, knees skidding on stale water. He’s watching in fury as a gang of boys from his form stalk across the communal showers, towards him like a pack hunting their prey. 

How did everything go so _wrong_ , Tom thinks. He can feel his body shake, unsure if it comes from adrenalin or all his eight-year old’s worth of rage. His first adoption ultimately turned into an educating experience of what not to do, and he was sure to apply the knowledge when he left the orphanage a second time. 

Picture-perfect, keen-eyed, sharp-mind Tom, hiding any — _funny business_ (as his previous adopter explained him away, back to Mrs. Cole) — with the veneer manners and polite obedience provided. And the Thackerays had immediately welcomed him to a new home with open arms. Be a wolf in lamb’s clothing, Tom had repeatedly reminded himself. Yet right now, as Tom tries to shakily rise up from the floor, he knows he isn’t the wolf anymore.

Groupthink, as a psychological term, wouldn’t be used until decades later;  
but here. In this moment;   
— _Now_ : Tom back on   
the ground again. Thin skin breaks   
under fingernails and cracked knuckles. Blood being smeared   
across porcelain tiles. The feeling of raw flesh   
against cold water. Darkness edging  
into his vision.

Everything is going off like snapshots in Tom’s mind, occasionally erupting in bursts of red fire. The persistent humming at the back of his mind gradually rises into a whine, but only this doesn’t fade away; Tom is lying in sticky redness, and unable to think. The pain aching around his sides has been gradually giving away to a persistent thudding in his head, so painful it makes him feel as if his teeth is rattling in accordance to the same beat with his mind.  

Tom tries to scrabble against the wet floor for purchase, unwilling to lay down as rugby practice. The boys laugh, and the leader is saying words foreign to his ringing ears, but the twisted face he makes is universally recognizable as a sneer. Suddenly all the air is expelled from his lungs as Tom falls. He’s choking on coughed-up air and blood, with a footprint newly muddying his torn cotton shirt.

One part of him is desperate. His eyes are stinging with unshed tears and he’s in so much pain, but he keeps his mouth clamped shut, jaw achingly tight. His lips are twisted together so hard they turn white. 

Tom knows what he needs to do so they will stop hurting him. They want him to beg for forgiveness for being a strange child, but he refuses to open his mouth. It’s not a matter of pride, not really; he’s given up so much more, in order to go from a penniless orphan, to living in Westminster and attending one of the finest prep schools in the country. Tom doesn’t want to dwell on regret, on both what he has and has not done. Looking into his own soul isn’t a luxury he can afford. And doesn’t he sound cynical, for a child? Yet opening his mouth and apologizing — and apologizing for _what_ , exactly? — feels like a revolting notion that goes against the very core of his body.

He knows he’s not a freak. He’s special in the way that clearly no one else is in the world. People fear what they don’t understand, and how Tom loathes this part of humanity. (Is this what makes him a monster?) So when Tom pushes away from the floor to stand up again, his black hair sticky and thighs a pulpy mess, Tom looks at the boys pulling back their legs to give him another round of kicking.

And _smiles_ , because Tom remembers what it is that they fear about him. He knows that the boys will definitely fear _this_ , and suddenly the ringing in his mind explodes outwards, as if in agreement. 

“Like fireworks," Tom tells Harry much later, as they sit crisscrossed in bed together, tangled in bedsheets and each other’s limbs. “It was glorious.” 

Right now, though, Tom is falling back onto the floor again, collecting yet another bruise to his already black-and-blue body. It’s not the force of another kick that knocks him backwards, but rather something that seems to expel out of him without his volition. The boys around him freeze, eyes darting from side to side, the human mind automatically deferring to animal instinct — until the leader of the gang shakes if off with a rattled laugh. Tom replies with one of his own, matching grin for grin, and he’s entirely conscious of the way he bares his teeth mimics more of a snarl.

Then as if time has slowed down, Tom feels suspended in amber, aware of the multitude of unlimited possibilities trembling in every single second. Pain becomes a dim afterthought, an echo of ache turning in his bones. He feels himself burning, from a concoction of desperation and rage shooting through his veins. And for one magnificent moment Tom lights up like a shooting star, hot and molten to his very core. 

He goes _incandescent_.

And — as if the laws of nature are bending in acceptance to a new sun, the wet floor gives a faint shudder, and shower cubicles tremble in harmony with the lavatory basins. The walls behind him lurches, and Tom wonders if this is why villains throw back their head in the old films, laughing like a maniac in the backdrop of their explosions. His anger has gained a new blade-sharp edge of vicious giddiness, and suddenly Tom is overwhelmed by how he wants too many things oh-so desperately.

The boys are stumbling back now, their faces marked with alarm and worry. Tom doesn’t know which part of what’s happening comes from conscious control, or as an extension from his own soul. As the latrines start gushing out fountains of tepid water, Tom finds he doesn’t really care.

That was me, he thinks. Wasn't it?  

* * *

  
In hindsight, limping out of the half-destroyed changing rooms with a deranged smile on his face wasn’t the best decision Tom’s ever made.

One of the boys that had kicked his stomach sees Tom and shudders, his mouth automatically moving in a silent prayer. Now instead of jeering down at Tom, as they had done so a handful of minutes earlier, the boys are lying together on smashed floor tiles. Another boy is on his knees, enthusiastically vomiting out buckets of brown sludge and red water. Tom looks at them and sees a heap of broken images.

“I think it was the water pressure,” Tom offers politely, to the shocked crowd of masters that had rushed to the scene, still warm from wearing a uniform soaked through with blood.

He tries to stop smiling, and finds that he can’t.

Between the suspended space of exhilarated uncertainty that lasts until he finds out Hogwarts exists, Tom keeps coming back to this point in the chasm years. It’s less a hymn of onism strung from regret (after all, he went back to the orphanage and found _Harry_ ), yet nevertheless still a moment tinged black, with the closure of a path that Tom will never be able to access again. Perhaps it’s this first feeling of true lost that sticks uncomfortably close to him.

(In the particularly harsh winter spanning past his ninth birthday and into the edges of late March, Tom huddles with Harry beneath their thin moth-eaten blankets, and unwillingly remembers the weekly joints of roast beef at the Thackerays. The fine clothes, the Latin prep books, the mews house tucked behind the grand shadow of Trafalgar Square — all luxuries he’s never had for the first six years of his life, fine things of splendor he didn’t have the time to grow accustomed to. But _oh_ , it’s the constant hunger lurching in his stomach that hurts the most.

 _—_ He doesn’t think of love, because what affection the Thackerays gave him was but a pale intimacy of how Harry treats him.)

The boys refuse to tell the Headmaster what happened in there, of course. Tom didn’t need to solicit a promise from them; after all, how _do_ you explain your too-quiet too-clever classmate adopted from some poor shanty orphanage in backwards London, that you were beating bloody and black and blue, suddenly imploding in the light of white divinity?

 


	2. Harry (After)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About POVs: I will alternate between Tom (before) and Harry (after) for each chapter.

## chapter one

 

“ _A truth should exist, it should not be used like this.  
If I love you / is that a fact or a weapon? _ "  
— from  _We are Hard_ , by Margaret Atwood

 

* * *

 

####  _Harry | After_

It’s just a pensieve. Harry knows all too well how these Merlin-cursed contraptions work, but as a vivid burn of colors explode across his vision, Harry awkwardly stumbles back with a hiss.

 _Yet another thing that makes Tom Riddle abnormal,_ he thinks warily. The usual sepia tint of memories is instead a saturated flush of reds that makes him blink back tears in his eyes. Everything is too loud, _too real_ ; golden sparks are flying in the sky, and amidst the cacophony Harry finds his fingers automatically twitching towards his wand. He shakes his head, irritated at himself. _Get a grip, you idiot. It’s just a memory_. _Nothing can hurt you here._  

Harry carefully squats down in the grit, broken rubble tumbling away at his feet. The eagerness he had originally felt suddenly gives away to mild regret. What exactly had he wanted to accomplish here, in a land of forgotten memories? He remembers Ginny yelling at him, bright and beautiful as a firecracker. The war is over, she had said. _“_ Grindelwald and Voldemort are dead! _I love you but how I wish you’ll see that we’ve finally won_ _—”_

For closure, he had told Hermione, which she, in her too-brilliant way, construed as _to let go_ ; the hope that Tom will remember him is an open wound constantly rubbed raw with salt. Across countless battlefields, Harry looks at Voldemort and sees Tom Riddle waiting. Would there be a glimpse of Harry as his younger and rasher self, lingering in this collection of memories? Grindelwald wouldn’t explain _how_ he had received them; simply clasped it to his hand with a pitying half-smile.

Memories, blood, dreams — the proof of life, inexplicable plenipotentiary of our will, extracted and distilled into a single bottle of meaning. Whether or not it's profound is another matter entirely, but at least that’s what he’s hoping for. Harry knows he has no right to ask for an answer, yet whenever he looks down at the silver vial glinting back at him, he’s struck with fierce longing.

Even in death, Tom is haunting him.

Utter annihilation, from Hong Kong to Marrakesh. Harry looks around him, at the eerie glow that only comes from explosions and sparking ash drifting through the air, and knows not where he is.

It’s a scene that’s been too-often replayed like a broken recorder before him, this familiar tableau of complete destruction. At least he feels mildly comforted by the lack of blood and broken bones in his sight. Humanity can be turned into a fleeting thing, but Harry makes sure to hold it tightly to his heart, as he wins back pyrrhic victories. In the midst of nightmare terrors indelible in their horror, with too much to completely acknowledge, survivors quickly become desensitized to death. Yet what point is there to keep on struggling, if Harry's no longer willing to care?

“Fancy seeing you here,” says a voice behind him.

Harry turns around. At the mouth of gaping ruins set aflame, a lone man stares down at him in obvious amusement. Harry looks back at Tom Riddle, still young and unbelievably beautiful, and one part of him turns weak in anticipation. Just him and Tom in this memory, together at the end of the world. It’s a mocking reminder of how this will be the closest thing for them to reach something resembling a resolution in real life, and honestly in these rare moments of regret, Harry wishes he could afford to be more selfish.

 _It’s not possible he’s talking to me_ , he thinks.  _Damn your wishful thinking Harry, that’s just not how pensieves work_ , but Tom’s already making his way towards him, in that graceful gait Harry knows uncomfortably well. The angel of death comes working his destruction.

“Walk with me,” says Tom, extending a hand. Harry can’t help but laugh out loud, suddenly and completely overwhelmed. _That bastard, still as demanding as ever._ It’s not hard to conjure up a reply, a cock-sure grin with that bright edge only someone (pretending to be) without a care in the world can come up with. When Tom smiles back in response, Harry’s suddenly hauled up by the throat.

“Never change, Harry." Tom laughs, his palm pushing against the base of Harry’s throat. It’s hard to breathe, but Harry smirks, and leans in even closer. He’s perplexed — how can Tom sense his presence, let alone touch him within a memory? But this, despite having abandoned the nuclear wasteland for more than a decade, is familiar territory to him: the phantom memory of sharp edges and harsher words as they slot against each other.

He grabs Tom’s hair and pulls him downwards, until they’re both face to face.

Tom looks even more delighted at this. Harry sees Tom wearing a smile of ammunition, fit to knock down the walls of Jericho — and immediately feels altogether too rash, blood molten like quicksilver. The way he’s forgotten _how_ ever since he and Tom had parted ways. Now seeing Tom makes him go hot and red all over, a blaze of light at the yawning cavern of the abyss.

“Anything for you,” Harry says, sly and full of snark, watching in satisfaction as Tom’s eyes dilate to darkness. _He’s missed this_.

 

* * *

 

They walk without stopping, in the pale fire of the sun, past the point where Harry’s legs have begun to ache in earnest. A clear expanse of nothingness stares back at them, stretching from his feet to the edges of the horizon. Harry’s suddenly struck by a stanza of poetry Hermione recited to him in the early hours of a winter dawn, the two of them shivering together on the outskirts of Sztutowo.  

As if attuned to Harry’s thoughts, Tom pauses deliberately, and draws him towards a breach of frozen water.  

Harry’s not an idiot. He knows too well how their tragedy will continue to end.   

“Indulge me,” Tom says, wearing his mockery of a smile. Nevertheless, his face remains a work of art to behold: marble, made carnal. “After all, nothing is real here.”

Harry looks at the man he’s never stopped loving, breaking apart every single feature and putting them back together in his mind. He knows what Tom wants, and oh Merlin _, I’ve always been weak for beautiful things._ Harry _—_ well, Harry _needs_ , and the effort that it takes to make himself look away leaves him shaking. Harry knows he sure as hell isn’t breathless from the cold air.  

“Is it lucky or unfortunate that I could never get behind your brand of destruction?” 

“Harry,” says Tom, “After all these years, still selfless to a fault. Aren’t you tired?”

 _—_ _Of being constantly used by others_ , so obvious to both of them it goes unsaid. _Listen to yourself. You’re not even trying, are you, Tom? How many times have I been tempted by you with much worse._

“You really ought to know better,” Harry says instead.

The expression of Tom’s face is a small, terrible thing; all implications unsaid in the torrent of blood between them.

How _dare_ you look at me like that, Harry thinks, seething. Anything would be better than to see an expression of intolerable tenderness on Tom reflected back to him. Not that there’s any need to search for where genuine feelings end and manipulation begins. All these years I’ve spent with you _—_ I could never read you, but I’ve learnt to know you too well. And isn’t that the most unfortunate blessing ever bestowed to me?

“I think,” and Tom is hesitant, in a new way he has never been, “if you felt less, you would be a happier person.”

“Oh?” Harry asks, slanting his eyes at the desolate landscape in bitter amusement. The rage that had flared up rapidly descends into something cool and terrible. “Are we talking about sixth year, Riddle?”

It’s a cheap shot, certainly, but Harry’s eager to use any ammunition he can find. Not that there’s any need to play fair with Tom Riddle; the man, however, remains unnervingly still.  _This,_  he realizes abruptly, _is not the Tom he remembers._

“After all this time, you’re behaving as if you are still afraid of monsters.”

“I think I’ve lost the right the day I started letting them sleep on my bed,” Harry says, then shakes his head abruptly. “But I never have been scared of you — at least give me that much credit.”

“I’m not talking about myself,” Tom says softly, stepping closer. Harry tenses, and watches in amazement as Tom gently sweeps away the strands of hair covering the scar on Harry’s forehead. “Tell me, Harry Potter. What haunts you in your dreams?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Exhales* _Wow_. I know I said I would update in 3-4 days, and I'm sorry this took way too long. Last week I got ridiculously sick (the last strains of summer flu, ugh), then promptly fell into a bit of an angsty-spiral where I would obsess over my writing, and basically feel that no matter how much I edited this chapter it's not good enough to be read by anyone? So that was fun.
> 
> (Also. Yes. Shamelessly in love with T. S. Eliot. There should be at least, what, four allusions to _TWL_? Or perhaps even more; god forbid I had placed any in subconsciously. Not to mention the amount of times I went.... "So @self, this is really gay?")
> 
> I really want to thank everyone for reading the last chapter, and especially those who have left kudos and kind comments. Your feedback is priceless; I want to become a better writer, and reading your comments have been super helpful. Again, please advise/critique below. 
> 
> Lots of love! xx


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